What, Exactly, Are We Celebrating About Charter Schools?
When Obama asks us to increase support for charter schools, he has missed the larger point.
In his proclamation for National Charter Schools Week, President Barack Obama asks us to accept a truth as yet unproven. He writes: “Today, our nation's very best charter schools are gateways to higher education and endless possibilities, lifting upstudents of all backgrounds and empowering them to achieve a brighter future.”
Obama is not the only one building the hype. Political praise for charter schools emanates from both sides of the aisle; nearly every conservative call for education reform extols charter schools, with said accolades usually accompanying calls for the holy grail of free-market thinking in the educational realm: more parental “choice.”
But no amount of proclaiming and rallying can upend the evidence, which is not good for the charter school camp. Considering that under Obama, the basic framework of education reform has hewn closely to the deeply flawedtemplate created by George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (and, arguably, raised the stakes even higher), perhaps we should use this week less for celebration and more to seriously consider the evidence. What, exactly, are we meant to celebrate about charter schools? What have they achieved?
Charter Advocacy Fails Against Evidence
For education reformers committed to market forces as a way to force public schools to improve, the initial focus was on vouchers that allowed parents to use public money to pay for private schools. During the Bush administration, however, researchers found that when controlling for student characteristics, private and public schools were mostly alike—both demonstratinga range of quality, the greatest factors being student characteristics.
Since the public has often resisted private-school vouchers, charter schools have become the next great hope that school choice will motivate public schools to reform. Yet in an analysis of charters conducted for the Shanker Institute, researcher Matthew Di Carlo has concluded that “there is nothing about ‘charterness’ that leads to strong results.” In other words, there is nothing about a school being identified as a charter school that excludes other types of schools (regular public, private) from adopting the same policies or practices; there is also nothing about a school operating as a charter school that specifically leads to success. (Take that as your first indication that charter advocacy is more about ideology than evidence-based reform.)
But if there’s nothing about the structure of charters that separates them from the pack, are we celebrating charter schools because of superior student achievement?
In my home state of South Carolina, the picture on student achievement in charters is much like it is in the rest of the U.S. Over a two-year analysis, I have compared SC charter schools with public schools with similar populations of students. Approximately 95% of those charter schools reflect student achievement about the same or worse than comparable public schools.
In other words, charter, public and private schools have about the same range of student outcomes. As Di Carlo stressed in his report, what we know to be true is that the type of school structure matters far less than what schools do and who the students are.
So if it’s not about school structure and it’s not about student achievement, are we celebrating charter schools for reversing the trend of re-segregation in U.S. public schools?
Sixty years after Brown v. Board, public schools across the country have become increasingly segregated by race and class. Few who seek education reform would argue against seeking policies that would counter that trend. Charter schools have demonstrably not met that need because they are significantly segregated—and charter schools also cause serious concern about selectivity, pushing out and under-serving marginalized student What, Exactly, Are We Celebrating About Charter Schools? | Alternet:
